Nicole Eisenman

Narrator: This sculptural installation by Nicole Eisenman was conceived for the Whitney’s sixth floor terrace.

Jane Panetta: So for this work, Eisenman was really interested in using the sixth floor terrace specifically. She looked at different spaces in the building and I think was really excited about the possibility of making a sculptural tableau that would have the city as the backdrop, that that would be a powerful place to present this strange procession of figures.

 Narrator: Biennial co-curator Jane Panetta.

Jane Panetta: One thing I really like about this work is the complicated tone of it as an installation. Nicole has always been interested in humor, and how she can use humor to get at more significant messages or more significant images. And I think in this work in particular there’s a real conflation of the kind of difficulty, struggly moment that we’re in in many ways, but also inflecting that with playful elements. And I think for her that’s both how she sees life and sees the world, but is also a way to really bring viewers into the space of the work.

For Eisenman, I think it was also really important that the work contained figures both in bronze and plaster. Of course bronze sculpture is related to a long history of sculpture and classical sculpture specifically. And I think by including materials like plaster, more ephemeral materials in the tableau, she’s playing with and complicating this history of sculpture very deliberately.